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Li Hongzhang

Given / Temple NameLi Shaoquan

The "paperhanger" who ran the Self-Strengthening for thirty years and bore all the blame for signing the treaties

Vessels of the Court · Chancellors & Reformers

The Self-Strengthening MovementThe Beiyang FleetThe Treaty of Shimonoseki

Who they are

Li Hongzhang came from Zeng Guofan’s school, rose by raising the Huai Army, and served twenty-five years as Viceroy of Zhili and Minister of the North, the late Qing’s "premier" in fact: founding the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company, the Kaiping Mines, the Telegraph Bureau, and the Tianjin Machine Works, and building the Beiyang Fleet, called the first in Asia. When the Beiyang Fleet was annihilated in the Sino-Japanese War, he went to Japan to negotiate the Treaty of Shimonoseki, was shot in the face by an assassin, and traded that bullet for a hundred-million-tael cut in the indemnity; after signing the Boxer Protocol in 1901 he died vomiting blood. He mocked himself as a "paperhanger" — the dilapidated house of the Qing he could patch here and paste there but not rebuild. In his Biography of Li Hongzhang, Liang Qichao wrote: "I respect Li Hongzhang’s talent, I pity Li Hongzhang’s insight, I grieve for Li Hongzhang’s circumstances."

Key stories

The gunshot at Shimonoseki

At the 1895 Shimonoseki talks, Itō Hirobumi was uncompromising and would not yield an inch. After the third round, Li Hongzhang was shot on the way back by a Japanese ruffian, the bullet striking his left cheekbone and staining his official robe with blood. He forbade the bloodstained robe to be washed: "This blood can serve the country." International opinion was in uproar, and Japan was forced to grant a ceasefire and cut the indemnity from three hundred million taels to two hundred million. A seventy-three-year-old man, with a bullet still in him, negotiated back a hundred million taels of silver — perhaps the most concrete showing ever of the four words "the diplomacy of a weak state."

The paperhanger’s confession

In his last years Li Hongzhang said of himself: "All my life’s work — training the army, the navy — was all a paper tiger… only a forced patching, all show and no substance, that could hold together a while so long as it was not torn open. Like a broken house, patched here and pasted there by a paperhanger… even in a little wind and rain, if a few holes are knocked through, they can be mended in time and made to serve. But if one insists on tearing it clean open, with no repair materials or plan of rebuilding prepared, then naturally the truth is laid bare, past all remedy." No inside diagnosis of the late Qing’s forty-year impasse is more precise than this confession.